On June 1st, 2009, America’s largest vehicle-manufacturer, General Motors, filed for bankruptcy. The US Treasury then invested $49.5bn in the company through its Troubled Assets Relief Program, and recovered $39bn of that when it sold its shares in 2013 - a loss of $10.3bn.The bankruptcy of such a major player in the US and, indeed, the world economy was a portent of changing times. The heyday of General Motors was the era of the big...

Cafe Hayek

… is from the new David Hart translation – still only on-line, but forthcoming in print – of Frédéric Bastiat’s 1850 Economic Harmonies; specifically, it is from the chapter titled “Competition” (footnotes excluded; emphasis added):
I believe that people fail to realize the genuine progress that the human race has made since the very recent period when the partial emancipation of labour began to take place. It has been said, and rightly so,...

|Peter Boettke|
Climate change is real; climate change is man-made, but once we agree on that there is still the matters of (1) trade-offs that must be made in negotiating public policy priorities and alternatives, (2) the adaptations and adjustments that human choosers will make due to the incentives they face as change is impressed upon them, and (3) the technological innovations that can in many cases ameliorate problems if not eliminate. ...

David Stockman’s Contra Corner

Job gains have been solid, according to the Establishment Survey, but somehow income gains haven’t. These things are inconsistent. Which is why you find no mention of the latter, only the former. The lack of income would raise serious questions about how the “growth of household spending” had “slowed in the first quarter” and more so whether any such thing could be transitory....